On Tuesday, Haley called US participation in the Olympics an
"open question." But the rest of her answer to Fox News anchor
Martha MacCallum made it sound like she expected the US to go as
usual, while taking security precautions.

It's always theoretically possible that some future event would
cause the US to pull out of an Olympic games. Maybe Haley's "open
question" comment was just an off-the-cuff way of acknowledging
the unknown of the future, not a statement she intended to raise
the prospect that the US was seriously questioning whether to go
to PyeongChang.

But then on Thursday, Sanders, who should have realized that she
might be asked about Haley's comments, said "no official
decision" had been made about US participation. And then, after
her press briefing, she tweeted to clarify that the US
"looks forward to participating in the Winter Olympics in
South Korea."

Okay, good, so we're going.

This isn't really the president's decision anyway. The US
Olympic Committee is an independent body, and it decides whether
to participate in the Olympics. In 1980, it was the USOC that
implemented the Olympic boycott for which President Jimmy Carter
called.

But obviously, the Trump administration could have caused a
lot of trouble for the US team, and for our relationship with
South Korea, by letting this idea sit out there that it's too
unsafe to go there for the Olympics.

We owe it to our South Korean allies to participate
unreservedly in PyeongChang. Any North Korean military threats
that would face American athletes and tourists at the Olympics
are faced on a daily basis by the South Korean people, not to
mention by tens of thousands of American troops stationed in
South Korea. We should stand in solidarity with them.

The Olympics are an important event for South Korean
national pride. These are the first Winter Olympics in Asia
outside Japan, ever. As with the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul,
these games are a reflection of South Korea's rise as a
high-income, democratic country with long and deep ties to the
US. It would be a real shame to miss that, or even to cast doubt
on the idea that we would participate.

And my guess is, the Trump Administration never made a
conscious decision to cast such doubt. Still,
would it have been that hard for these officials to just say
"yes" when asked whether we were going to go?

President Trump has created all sorts of ambiguity about
when and how the US will stand by its allies. This was an easy
opportunity to show our solidarity, and his team still didn't
manage to get it quite right.

* I am a paid contributor to MSNBC and NBC News, so I should
note that NBC holds the US broadcast rights to the Olympics. Of
course, NBC exercises no editorial oversight of my writing for
Business Insider.